Edward Norman <\/a><\/p>\n 27 April, 2010<\/p>\n There has not been, to say the least, a paucity of books about John Henry Newman, or of books which touch upon the significance of his contribution to religious understanding. He is, quite simply, the most important Christian expositor in the English language, whose influence on theological and ecclesiological issues has persisted throughout the last two centuries.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many studies of his life and thought have demonstrated the finest scholarship, and now, to add to them, is a work of rare insight and careful balance of judgment. John Cornwell does not, it is true, exploit new sources or reveal previously unknown fragments of writing: Newman\u2019s legacy is far too manicured for that. What this new study does is to ask penetrating questions of the existing body of information, and, by extremely pertinent cultural cross-reference, and apposite deployment of modern insights into human conditioning, to give the reader a richer interpretation of Newman\u2019s extraordinary genius.<\/p>\n The book begins and ends with the question of whether Newman should be raised to sainthood. This is a dangerous area because the remains of all candidates for formal sanctity are exposed for critical examination. In Newman\u2019s case, as it happens, this procedure removed itself from the desk of scholarship to his actual grave (which, as it turned out, was empty.) Modern obsessions have intruded: some persistent atheists and anti-Catholics have suggested, often with actual as well as ecclesiastical prurience, that Newman\u2019s personal friendships indicate a love which dares to tell its name just about every time you open a newspaper. Such things are of no consequence, and Cornwell very sensibly raises them mostly to acknowledge the context of priorities lamentably predominant in the society to which his book is to be delivered. \u201cI just set out to write a book,\u201d he declares, \u201cthat would answer the question \u2014 why should Newman be of interest to a readership beyond Catholics or 19th-century Church historians?\u201d That aspiration is splendidly achieved.<\/p>\n Newman is not difficult to categorise. It is just that his values are so far removed from modern priorities that many who attempt to understand his subtleties and distinctions will fall at the first hurdle and wander off into the first available exit-route of explanation. Newman himself eschewed sanctity: \u201cSaints are not literary men.\u201d He was, however, above all a literary man, a pilgrim of meaning. He returned again and again to the history of his own life, and to his evolving understanding of things, in order to discover larger truths resident in the smaller habitations of individual perception. This persistent introspection was, in his case, neither morbid nor confining \u2014 and it essentially lacked the vanity to which are given to those who routinely lubricate the nuts and bolts of their interior being. Newman\u2019s prose was clear and beautiful as well as being painstakingly precise. In a rather undersized version, his personal development illustrated the general and dialectical nature of accumulating religious understanding that he described, on a large scale, in his last book as an Anglican, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine<\/em> (1845). His concept of change and growth in ideas was not founded in observation of human behaviour, and its organic language is to that extent deceptive. It was based in the drama of ideas in the context of time.<\/p>\n Newman belonged to no party in the Church (Anglican or Catholic), though he was subsequently claimed by most parties. He owed no consistent indebtedness to any particular school of thought. It was not that which raised, for some commentators, a problem in their apparent need to categorise him \u2014 it showed simply that he departed from the common assumptions of the ruling passions at an early stage. Newman can<\/em> be categorised: he was a scholar of ideas who believed in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. This point plainly emerges in Cornwell\u2019s analysis of Newman\u2019s plans for the Catholic University in Dublin, whose first Rector he became, and whose scheme of liberal education was displayed in The Idea of a University<\/em> (1852). In this section of his book, incidentally, Cornwell shows the value of his capacity for cultural cross-reference \u2014 in this case to the later observations of Edward Said and James Joyce.<\/p>\n The grandeur of Newman\u2019s thinking is surely unaffected by occasional scepticism which may hedge the minds of his readers about the reliability of some of his intellectual conclusions. Newman when he was wrong at all, was invariably wrong in the right kind of way. He placed supreme priority, for example, upon the sovereignty of conscience \u2014\u00a0<\/em>which he seems to have understood as a species of divinely implanted faculty. It may be far more likely that what people call \u201cconscience\u201d has no such august pedigree, and is merely collected and remembered moral precept instilled through the chance conditioning of social circumstance. Newman was, in all essentials, integrated within empirical modes of thought, and his view of conscience, and of the \u201cillative\u201d sense outlined in the Grammar of Assent<\/em> (1870), sit rather uncomfortably with empirical observation.<\/p>\n Most of Cornwell\u2019s study is independent of the top and tail of the book on the issue of personal sanctity. The book itself is defined by the author\u2019s choice of themes and original insights. Cornwell wisely leaves the question of whether Newman should be raised to the altars for settlement by the official procedures. Newman himself was not quite so laconic. And ordering that his coffin should be embedded in soft mulch \u2014 to hasten decomposition of the contents \u2014 is not the action of one who envisaged the subsequent distribution of relics. He regarded his Cardinal\u2019s hat (in 1879) as \u201ca strange turn-up\u201d, and had already done all he could to see that no personal cult should attach to his memory.<\/p>\n Towards the end of Cornwell\u2019s book there is a particularly helpful introduction of a very modern question: would Newman have approved of the pluralist society of today? Since Newman was a consistent opponent of liberalism in religion, and was more or less indifferent to political action, at least as it affected him personally, there is every reason to suppose that he would extend his antipathy from liberalism in religion to liberalism in the general conduct of public\u00a0affairs. Cornwell raises the matter shortly after a section on Newman\u2019s biglietto<\/em> speech, delivered when he was in Rome to be made a Cardinal. In it he had repeated his lifelong hostility to liberalism and to the drift of society towards, as Cornwell puts it, \u201cwhat we would call a pluralist, secular society today\u201d. Then, in Newman\u2019s words, religion becomes a \u201cprivate luxury\u201d which must not \u201cobtrude upon others\u201d. In Cornwell\u2019s subsequent argument he presents a contrast \u201cbetween pluralism and fundamentalism\u201d. The former allows \u201cindividuals and groups of individuals to search and choose their own values and beliefs\u201d within a \u201cmore or less secular state\u201d; in the latter, \u201cvalues and beliefs are best imposed, and accepted unquestioningly, top down\u201d. The conclusion: \u201cNewman, for all his animosity towards liberalism in religion, clearly would have defended religious pluralism today, and opposed fundamentalism.\u201d<\/p>\n It is a very important issue to raise, and Cornwell raises it with admirable intellectual coherence and balance of judgment. But religious pluralism, in modern Western societies \u2014 when set in context \u2014 has become a marginal affair. It is pluralism in the major preoccupations of moral and political values, the extensively promoted \u201cculture of diversity\u201d, which progressively immerses public affairs in a nexus of materialist relativism whose exclusivity is recognised by a kind of consensus. It walks hand-in-hand with the normative and definitely \u201cfundamentalist\u201d concept \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d. The fine distinction that Cornwell posits in order to demonstrate Newman\u2019s supposed compatibility with modern pluralism is in reality dissolved, by today\u2019s practice, in an acid-bath of what he categorises as \u201cfundamentalism\u201d. There is nothing very liberal about the present evidences of the \u201cplural society\u201d, which is not much more than the enforcement by the power of the State of ever more regulation of individual lives and individual choice of values and courses of action. The concept of a plural society is in reality a sham: everyone is compelled by law into a uniformity of assent, and for moral reasons, in such matters as race, gender, sexual orientation, the curriculae for education.\u00a0<\/p>\n Seemingly everything is becoming a matter of State prescription and compulsion. It is an enlightened tyranny of welfare materialism. This is a society of compulsory moral uniformity, and it is only in matters judged to be of lesser value \u2014 religious choice in a polity that promotes a practical secularism \u2014 that evidences of authentic diversity are tolerated. The Catholics have discovered the reality over the issue of gay adoption.<\/p>\n Newman might have found a measure of pluralism conducive in the circumstances of 19th-century bourgeois liberalism, had it developed according to canons then within conceivable calculation. It developed into the 20th-century collectivist state, and at the behest of well-meaning secular Puritans whose dogma of \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d promotes the very antithesis of genuine pluralism. Newman would not have approved. Cornwell\u2019s distinction \u201cbetween pluralism and fundamentalism\u201d is lost. The modern State, as exemplified in Western societies, is characterised by the use of laws to enforce values evidently authenticated by populist democracy on a very large scale. Newman would have been appalled.<\/p>\n <\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n Newman’s Unquiet Grave: Portrait of a Reluctant Saint by John Cornwell<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_Henry-Newman.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
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Hunting for meaning<\/a>
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\nThe weird West<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
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\nHunting for meaning<\/a>
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\nThe weird West<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"